Technology has seen an unprecedented ramp-up over the past several years. In our new technological world, the systems that support the technology have become increasingly complex, and the world has become wired. The Bluetooth wireless local area network operates to eliminate those wires.
The Bluetooth wireless LAN system has been in existence for a number of years now, but it is just beginning to garner a great deal of attention from the corporate world. The wireless LAN system as implemented allows everyday devices to communicate with each other on “scatternets.” In brief, a scatternet is a sort of amorphous network. The devices connected to the network constantly change because of their mobile nature, and the mobile nature of the network itself. Each network device has the capability to be either a master or a slave, and sometimes both at the same time.
The network devices communicate with each other via a radio frequency (RF) connection. First generation Bluetooth devices use a spread spectrum frequency hopping (SSFH) technique in the 2.4 GHz, Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) frequency range. This supports a data transfer rate of around 1 Mbps. Further, the frequency hopping nature of the network also makes it difficult to intercept the transmissions, because the transmission frequency is constantly hopping in accordance with a hopping sequence known to both of the network devices and set based on the clock signal of the master device.
As such, the radio transmitters and receivers of these devices need to be very complex. The receiver comprises both a radio portion and a data detection portion. Data detection comes in many different forms. However, most of the existing data detection methods create problems in terms of either power consumption and/or cost efficiency. It is to that end that the present invention is aimed, i.e. performing data detection in a way that reduces power consumption requirements and that is cost efficient.